This issue centres on the outcome of the General Election in Britain, and the complete hollowness of Starmer’s Labour Party victory. The lead article analyses this. Far from having brought about any recovery in the Labour Party’s electoral support, Starmer’s Labour got around half-a-million fewer votes than Labour led by Jeremy Corbyn in the ‘disaster’ of 2019. Yet Labour achieved the biggest majority, 174, since Blair in 1997. The reason for the change is not any surge to Labour, but the collapse of the Conservative Party under the weight of its own contradictions, and the undemocratic nature of the first-past-the-post electoral system in Britain. So Starmer’s ‘mandate’ is shallow indeed, and he has no mandate for more neoliberal attacks, support for Zionist genocide or warmaking against Russia.
Starmer’s Labour is up to its neck in support for genocide in Gaza, though as the General Election campaign began it started talking about of the other side of its mouth. It feared the campaigns of numerous left-wing independents, often Muslim or Palestinian anti-war activists, and left-wing anti-Zionist currents like the Workers Party led by George Galloway and Chris Williamson. The victory of five independents, including Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North, and four others who challenged Labour MPs over Gaza, including ejecting Starmer-crony Jonathan Ashworth from his previously safe Leicester South parliamentary seat, was accompanied by near-misses in several other constituencies, including the near-defeat of Zionist agent Wes Streeting in Ilford North.
The article also pays attention to right-wing populism. It locates an underlying reason for the rise in right-wing populism in a number of imperialist countries in the clash between two sets of related bourgeois factions in those countries: one of which has as its centre of gravity in the ‘globalisation’ of capital that became dominant in the period of enhanced US world hegemony after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-91. In explaining the rise of the other, we republish an old theoretical piece from 1997 by Joseph Seymour of the Spartacist League, which bluntly points out that the imperialist bourgeoisie is a nationally-limited class, incapable of transcending adherence to the nation-state.
It is arguable that the right-wing populism of today is the result of this bourgeois inability to escape the nation-state, and a backlash within the imperialist bourgeoisies against the trend to imperialist globalisation under US ultra-hegemony – which is now coming to an end with the rise of Russia and China back to world-prominence. One symptom of this division in the ruling class is populist dissent over the Ukraine war, in which the liberals make extensive use of Ukrainian Nazis and is seen particularly a project of ‘globalisers’ in the US Democratic Party. This has enhanced the popular support of some on the populist right where anti-migrant sentiment has not always been enough; pro-imperialist Russophobia of many on the left has helped the far right exploit this issue.
The back page article is about the apparent victory of the New Popular Front (NPF) in France over Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR) in the National Assembly elections that were called by President Macron after the NR won the European Parliament election. It points out that while the NPF had managed by tactical voting and class-collaboration to thwart the NR in this election, the class-collaboration, and the fact that key elements of the NPF are ardent supporters of the Ukraine war, actually boosted the popular vote of the NR on the second round even as they lost out in terms of seats. This the NPF victory is far from decisive, it has merely postponed the decisive conflict with the NR. Le Pen will be a potent danger in the 2027 Presidential election.
This issue highlights our united front work over Ukraine, in International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS), which was a bloc of ourselves (and our earlier organisation Socialist Fight), the New Communist Party, the British Posadists, and a number of non-aligned anti-imperialist activists. We reprint three leaflets produced by IUAFS that have been distributed to address broader layers of anti-imperialists in the Gaza movement.
This issue also has an article dealing with the despoliation of nature and the capitalist expropriation of food sources, and some of the historical aspects of this, and an article celebrating the release of Julian Asssange from his persecution over the last decade and a half for exposing the crimes of US imperialism, a struggle we have supported all along.
